Masculine animate as a subgender of masculine in Polish: evidence from psycholinguistics

Abstract

This paper investigates grammatical gender and animacy distinctions in Polish. Differences in agreement morphology between masculine animate nouns and masculine inanimate nouns have long motivated debates regarding the number of gender categories in Polish. The present paper contributes to this discussion from the perspective of psycholinguistics. Evidence from native Polish speakers’ gaze patterns collected during an eyetracking study using the Visual World Paradigm suggests that, during real-time language processing, when speakers hear an adjective suffixed with the masculine animate accusative morpheme -ego, this activates a masculine gender feature and an independent animacy feature. This constitutes evidence in support of treating gender and animacy as independent noun categorization systems in Polish.